Unprecedented pressures facing the NHS are felt not least by the hundreds of thousands of people living in Scotland with the impact of a stroke, coronary heart disease, heart failure, asthma or long COVID.

Now almost one year on from the relaunch of Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland’s No Life Half Lived strategy, Chief Executive Jane-Claire Judson explains how it has impacted both the way the charity engages with NHS partners, and on the services it provides.

At Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland (CHSS), we aim to ensure people can live life to the full with the conditions we support.

We do this through providing post diagnosis supported self-management and community recovery support, as well as in many health boards delivering rehabilitation services.

This means that what we do, and our ambition to reach more people, neatly meets the needs of our pressured NHS.

Everyone in Scotland is affected by a chest, heart or stroke condition.

With one in five people in Scotland living with one of our conditions, if you are not directly affected you will know someone who is. People with our conditions make up many patients visiting their GPs and attending at accident and emergency day in day out.

Often, this is because they are one of the half a million people in Scotland who do not receive rehabilitation or self-management support on leaving NHS care. They are not supplied with the tools and confidence to live well with their condition.

There’s no single answer to the health and social care crisis we’re facing, but charities like CHSS can alleviate some of the pressure: people who use our services rate their health and wellbeing higher than those who don’t. That means they need less support from their GPs, community health services and in many cases acute care.

At CHSS, we’ve developed our Community Healthcare Support Service to bring clarity to what we offer. It is the next stage in our overarching No Life Half Lived strategy – which is creating a Scotland where people can live full, happy lives while managing chest, heart, stroke or Long COVID conditions.

I recently spoke about the new service at a series of webinars with health and social care colleagues from across Scotland. It was wonderful to be able to explain to partners that they can count on us to pick up some of the ongoing support their patients need.

I explained we are rolling out our evidence-based supported self-management programme, initially developed at Stanford University, health board by health board.

It is proven to help people manage pain better, deal with fatigue and low energy, feel more able to deal with difficult emotions, and build confidence to advocate for their rights.

All this is delivered using supportive goal setting and backed up by our clinical Advice Line and follow-on services like peer support and kindness volunteers.

At CHSS we like to listen; we listen to people with our conditions who tell us what matters to them, and at these webinars we listened to our NHS colleagues.

I heard people say they want to be able to refer more patients to our valuable one-to-one support services and they want to receive more referrals from us for things like smoking cessation support.

Others said they were frustrated some of our services weren’t available in their areas, and NHS colleagues also challenged us on what we’re doing in the preventative space to ensure fewer people develop chest, heart and stroke conditions.

But we don’t just like to listen – we then like to do, to take action. All of these are things CHSS is willing and able to do.

Our successful Maryhill based Heath Defence programme has just launched in Tayside, for example. This means more people with risk factors like high blood pressure will get help to improve their health and access the services they need.

Our colleagues in areas like NHS Lothian and NHS Grampian, where we are rolling out our full Community Healthcare Support Service pilots this autumn, understand the value of working with CHSS and spoke very eloquently about that at these webinars.

Overall, where we already have strong local partnerships we can begin to deliver this solution, and where we have had less delivery in the past, we can explore what we can do in partnership to pilot and build capacity towards full roll out.

Over the coming months, I want to ensure every health professional in Scotland understands what CHSS can offer. My colleagues and I will continue to deepen existing relationships and build new ones with clinicians and allied health professionals, NHS commissioners and individual GPs, physiotherapists, speech therapists and occupational therapists.

When I launched our refreshed No Life Half Lived strategy last year, I vowed we would support 175,000 people a year to live happier, healthier lives by 2028. We know through working with our partners we can achieve this ambitious aim.

Together we can ensure there is No Life Half Lived because of a chest, heart, stroke or Long COVID condition.

 

You can watch one of CHSS’s webinars back on its YouTube Channel or visit the health professionals page on its website to find out more about CHSS services. If you’d like to discuss a need in your area, you can get in touch with Head of Service Delivery Claire Bennet at Claire.bennet@chss.org.uk

 

Read more: Right to rehab: The first step to recovery; Stroke care only reaches half of Scots patients; Call for legal right of Scots to rehabilitation; Psychological support after stroke lacking

 

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